Interview with The Bravery: Eclectic Collections

Included on the Projekt Revolution roster, Island Def Jam’s The Bravery bring their unique sound to the tour’s main stage. What follows is a brief interview with vocalist and founding member Sam Endicott, a mixture of talk of The Bravery’s involvement in the tour, the band’s beginnings, Endicott’s creative process and experiences behind and in front of the video camera.

Can you tell a little about The Bravery’s involvement with the Projekt Revolution tour and, maybe, about the tour in general?

Well, Linkin Park started it and I think, this year, they’re trying to be a little more eclectic with different kinds of bands. I think that’s one of the reasons they asked us to do it; we’re sort of unlike the normal bands that they have there. They also have Busta Rhymes and Hawthorne Heights and Atreyu and a bunch of emo bands. Chris Cornell. There are a lot of bands and it’s something I’ve never done before. The Linkin Park guys are super cool, friendly guys so there’ll be a lot of cookouts, Frisbee, some Hacky Sack.

Is that kind of communal, festival atmosphere something that’s completely new for you or have you experienced it before?

We’ve never done a touring festival before. We’ve opened for big bands on tour before, and have done festivals, of course, but we’ve never done one of these touring festivals where there’re, like, a zillion bands on the road together.

Looking back on The Bravery’s start, can you reflect on how the group was formed and where it is now? The beginning is similar to countless other bands, but your success is the exception.

Well, we started–it’s a little bit unusual–basically me and John, the keyboardist, were just fucking around in our room on our computers and making electronic music. We grew up on punk rock shit, Rancid, The Clash, The Ramones, and then we got into electronic music because you could just make it really cheaply. You didn’t need any money at all and could just sit there in your room and do it, and make something that sounded like real, actual music (laughs).

So we thought it would be cool to combine those two elements, the punk rock and the electronic. So, that’s it. It started when we recorded, maybe seven songs or something, then we met the other guys and started playing live. So when we started playing we already had an EP recorded, basically. We put that online–we were one of the first bands to discover MySpace.

MySpace was like a new thing; it wasn’t popular then. Or it was just starting to get popular–so we put our stuff all over [there] and all over our website and started to develop a following in New York. I think, because we already had this album recorded that things happened very quickly and DJs started playing it without a label or anything and we were getting some pretty major airplay in the U.K. and in America. It was in the U.K. that it took off first so we went there to capitalize on that. We moved into a place in London and just lived there for a while.